What was the story with Y2K

When Y2K was going on, I didn't care about these doomsday theories. I see a lot of references to Y2K, and I just want to know what the deal was. I don't believe doomsday theories, don't get me wrong, I think there stupid.

OK here's the deal.when they made all the techno stuff.the inboard calenders only went to 1999.and everyone was afraid that on the day it hit 2000 all the computers would crash having global consequences.the gov spent billions of dollars fixing the computer systems before it happened

A lot of programs stored only 2 digits for the year. So the year 1998 was stored as 99, and the programmers just assumed it was supposed to be 1998 and not 1898 or 2098. The trouble was the year 00 would be assumed to be 1900 and not 2000, and that would mess up every date calculation the program did. Some people claimed this problem would be much worse than just getting dates wrong. They claimed there were programs at the heart of all kinds of computer controlled devices that otherwise did not appear to depend on dates, and all those programs would malfunction. Programs that controlled power plants and radars and all kinds of things. Programmers all over the world (including me) had to check every program and find every date calculation and make sure it used 4 digits for the year, and rewrite it if it was using 2 digits, and complete all work before January 1, 2000. We succeeded pretty well, there were no major problems.

Back in the 1960s, when computer storage (especially RAM) was expensive -- about 50 cents per byte -- programmers used various shortcuts to save memory. One way was to use only two digits to represent the year. Few (if any) people at the time thought that the programs they were writing would still be in use in 2000; they may also have thought that the hardware would have improved enough by then that it wouldn't be a big issue.